This dissertation shows how the figure of the génie was constituted in France over the course of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, by highlighting the paradoxes which allowed such a figure to become the fundamental notion of modernity. The analysis revolves around three main lines. First, the circumstances for the invention of the very term génie in the French language are examined by focusing on the Greco-Latin cultural background it carried along. As a result, the notion appears as intimately connected to the genius of the French language and its history. Secondly,
the analysis focuses on the role this notion played within the normative framework of poetic production at the end of the 17th century. Paradoxically, the value of the génie, which was then defined as the natural ability for the exercising of a regulated technique of poesis, was inconceivable without the transgression of such a normative framework. This social paradox underscores the fact that a génie was, at once, considered both as exceptional and exemplary. Finally, this very paradox his analyzed further within the trajectory of the development of aesthetic theories, during
the 18th century, which were founded on a community-defining experience of beauty. This specific issue his examined with reference to the interest sensualist philosophers displayed, in particular, for the mechanisms of invention and discovery. The investigation comes to the following essential conclusion: the génie was, at the same
time, problematic for the theories that attempted to circumscribe it and unifying for the communities which were illustrated through it.